There are two Orphic stories of the rebirth of Dionysus, in one of which it is the heart of Dionysus that is implanted into the thigh of Zeus ; the other where he has impregnated the mortal woman Semele resulting in Dionysus's literal rebirth.

Then looking at him darkly Zeus who gathers the clouds spoke to him :' Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar. To me you are the most hateful of all gods who hold Olympos. Forever quarrelling is dear to your heart, wars and battles .… And yet I will not long endure to see you in pain, sinceyou are my child, and it was to me that your mother bore you. But were you born of some other god and proved so ruinouslong since you would have been dropped beneath the gods of the bright sky.

Zeus rescued the heart and gave it to Semele to impregnate her ; or, the heart was saved, variously, by Athena, Rhea, or Demeter.

Zeus used the heart to recreate Dionysus and implant him in the womb of Semele — hence Dionysus became known as " the twice-born ".

Certain versions imply that Zeus gave Semele the heart to eat to impregnate her.

In Prometheus Unbound ( 1820 ), a four-act lyrical drama, Percy Bysshe Shelley rewrites the lost play of Aeschylus so that Prometheus does not submit to Zeus ( under the Latin name Jupiter ), but instead supplants him in a triumph of the human heart and intellect over tyrannical religion.

But in another account, Zeus swallows the heart himself, in order to beget his seed on Semele.

Nonnus does not present the conception as virginal ; rather, the editor's notes say that Zeus swallowed Zagreus ' heart, and visited the mortal woman Semele, whom he seduced and made pregnant.

Zeus, discovering the crime, hurled a thunderbolt at the Titans, turning them to ashes, but Persephone ( or in some accounts Athena, Rhea, or Hermes ) managed to recover Zagreus ' heart.

Some accounts say that he was reassembled and resurrected by Demeter ; others, that Zeus fed his heart to Semele in a drink, making her pregnant with Dionysus.

Poems are also addressed to his own heart or spirit, and deities such as Zeus, Apollo, Artemis, Castor and Pollux, Eros, Ploutos, the Muses and Graces.

When Amatsu-Mikaboshi arrived, he rips out Zeus ' heart again.

Athena saves the heart and tells Zeus of the crime who in turn hurls a thunderbolt on the Titans.

With all my heart, with everything I can offer, I beg you, in Zeus ' name, who watches over all supplicants, accept my plea.

In the first step of a two step procedure Dr. Douglas Boyd used Zeus to perform an endoscopic, single-vessel heart bypass surgery on a 55 year-old male patient's left anterior descending artery.

By the late 5th century BC, philosophers might separate Aphrodite into two separate goddesses, not individuated in cult: Aphrodite Ourania, born from the sea foam after Cronus castrated Uranus, and Aphrodite Pandemos, the common Aphrodite " of all the folk ," born from Zeus and Dione.

Extending one night into three, Zeus slept with Alcmene ( his great-granddaughter ) ( thereby conceiving Heracles ) and recounted Amphitryon's victories against the Teleboans.

Some traditions related that at the time when Aeacus was born, Aegina was not yet inhabited, and that Zeus changed the ants () of the island into men ( Myrmidons ) over whom Aeacus ruled, or that he made men grow up out of the earth.

Ovid, on the other hand, supposes that the island was not uninhabited at the time of the birth of Aeacus, and states that, in the reign of Aeacus, Hera, jealous of Aegina, ravaged the island bearing the name of the latter by sending a plague or a fearful dragon into it, by which nearly all its inhabitants were carried off, and that Zeus restored the population by changing the ants into men.

72 accounts for the island's archaic name Ortygia by asserting that Zeus transformed Leto into a quail ( ortux ) in order to prevent Hera from finding out his infidelity, and Kenneth McLeish suggested further that in quail form Leto would have given birth with as few birth-pains as a mother quail suffers when it lays an egg.

The Iliad reduced the figure of the dread goddess to that of a girl, who, having been thrashed by Hera, climbs weeping into the lap of Zeus.

Out of pity, Zeus placed Callisto the bear into the heavens, thus the origin of Callisto the Bear as a constellation.

She won so much land for her father's kingdom that Zeus became enraged and changed her into a monster.

But to have her, Zeus disguised himself, Ovid says, as Artemis ( Diana ) herself, in order to lure her into his embrace.

Either Artemis " slew Kallisto with a shot of her silver bow ," perhaps urged by the wrath of Juno ( Hera ) or later Arcas, the eponym of Arcadia, nearly killed his bear-mother, when she had wandered into the forbidden precinct of Zeus.

She therefore ( as mentioned at the Kypria according to Proclus as part of a plan hatched by Zeus and Themis ) tossed into the party the Apple of Discord, a golden apple inscribed Kallisti – " For the most beautiful one ", or " To the Fairest One " – provoking the goddesses to begin quarreling about the appropriate recipient.

The story of Prometheus ' sacrifice-trick in Hesiod's Theogony relates how Prometheus tricked Zeus into choosing the bones and fat of the first sacrificial animal rather than the meat to justify why, after a sacrifice, the Greeks offered the bones wrapped in fat to the gods while keeping the meat for themselves.

According to the Homeric Hymn III to Delian Apollo, Hera detained Eileithyia to already prevent Leto from going into labor with Artemis and Apollo, since the father was Zeus.

One account of the origin of the Milky Way is that Zeus had tricked Hera into nursing the infant Heracles: discovering who he was, she pulled him from her breast, and a spurt of her milk formed the smear across the sky that can be seen to this day.

Zeus took the child and completed its gestation sewn into his own thigh.

Hera tricked Semele into asking Zeus to show his true form, which killed her.

Hera almost caught Zeus with a mistress named Io, a fate avoided by Zeus turning Io into a beautiful white heifer.

Zeus condemned her by turning her into a turtle.

In Thrace, Hera and Zeus turned King Haemus and Queen Rhodope into mountains, the Balkan ( Haemus Mons ) and Rhodope mountain chains respectively, for their hubris in comparing themselves to the gods.

The goddesses chose to place the matter before Zeus, who, not wanting to favor one of the goddesses, put the choice into the hands of Paris, a Trojan prince.

Heracles, whom Zeus had originally intended to be ruler of Argos, Lacedaemon and Messenian Pylos, had been supplanted by the cunning of Hera, and his intended possessions had fallen into the hands of Eurystheus, king of Mycenae.

After his death, his lyre was thrown into the river ; Zeus sent an eagle to retrieve the lyre, and ordered both of them to be placed in the sky.

The word has also been linked to Lycaon, a king of Arcadia who, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses, was turned into a ravenous wolf in retribution for attempting to serve human flesh ( his own son ) to visiting Zeus in an attempt to disprove the god's divinity.

In Greek mythology, Zeus places his son born by a mortal woman, the infant Heracles, on Hera's breast while she is asleep so that the baby will drink her divine milk and will thus become immortal.

A demigod is a the son or daughter from one immortal and one mortal parent, example would be Herakles, son of the mortal queen Alkema and the god Zeus.

Hercules is the Roman name for the Greek demigod Heracles, who was the son of Zeus ( Roman equivalent Jupiter ) and the mortal Alcmene.

Heracles was the son of the affair Zeus had with the mortal woman Alcmene.

Thus, Heracles ' very existence proved at least one of Zeus ' many illicit affairs, and Hera often conspired against Zeus ' mortal offspring as revenge for her husband's infidelities.

They asked Zeus to judge which of them was fairest, and eventually he, reluctant to favour any claim himself, declared that Paris, a Trojan mortal, would judge their cases, for he had recently shown his exemplary fairness in a contest in which Ares in bull form had bested Paris's own prize bull, and the shepherd-prince had unhesitatingly awarded the prize to the god.

She was often portrayed as the shrewish, jealous wife of Zeus, who himself often escaped from her controlling ways by cheating on her with other women, mortal and immortal.

In an apparent twist on the myth of the so-called Five Ages of Man found in Hesiod's Works and Days ( wherein Cronus and, later, Zeus created and destroyed five successive races of mortal men ), Prometheus asserts that Zeus had wanted to obliterate the human race, but that he somehow stopped him.

Pseudo-Apollodorus ' Bibliotheke asserts that Thetis was courted by both Zeus and Poseidon, but she was married off to the mortal Peleus because of their fears about the prophecy by Themis ( or Prometheus, or Calchas, according to others ) that her son would become greater than his father.

Asclepius ' death at the hands of Zeus illustrates man's inability to challenge the natural order that separates mortal men from the gods.

Zeus forced Cronus to disgorge the other children in the reverse order in which they had been swallowed, the oldest becoming the last, and youngest: first the stone, which was set down at Pytho under the glens of Parnassus to be a sign to mortal men, then the rest.

Their mother was Leda, but Castor was the mortal son of Tyndareus, king of Sparta, and Pollux the divine son of Zeus, who visited Leda in the guise of a swan.

In Greek mythology, he is presented as a son of Zeus and the mortal Semele, thus semi-divine or heroic: and as son of Zeus and Persephone or Demeter, thus both fully divine, part-chthonic and possibly identical with Iacchus of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Semele (;, Semelē ), in Greek mythology, daughter of the Boeotian hero Cadmus and Harmonia, was the mortal mother of Dionysus by Zeus in one of his many origin myths.

His mortal mother, Semele, was a mistress of Zeus, and while pregnant, she was killed because her sisters accused her of lying about her son's paternity and their father Cadmus using Zeus as a cover up.

Her sisters spread the report that she had only endeavored to conceal unmarried sex with a mortal man, by pretending that Zeus was the father of her child, and said that her destruction was a just punishment for her falsehood.

On Hera's instigation she used her influence over Zeus so that he swore an oath that on that day a mortal descended from him would be born who would be a great ruler.

One of the twins ( Polydeuces, Heracles ) is the illegitimate son of the god Zeus ; his brother is the son of their mother's mortal husband.